MALADAPTIVE Altruism: Western Culture in Decline
Jennifer Williams
Maladaptive Altruism: Western Culture in Decline.
(Or: "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." Gore Vidal)
"Natural selection at the gene level is concerned with competition
among alleles for a particular chromosomal slot in a shared
gene-pool." Richard Dawkins.
The following article was inspired by rereading The Extended
Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene by Richard Dawkins, 1982. (For a
quick overview of what that book says about maladaptive altruism read
excerpts that follow in Appendix A.) But I understood its basic
principles while reading Nietzsche over thirty years ago as I pondered
a very alien world, one that I was unprepared to face. Growing up in
a Midwestern state with mostly Scandinavians and Germans, I looked
around and could not understand why my relatives were so passive and
aloof. They lacked the aggressiveness that seemed to be natural to
me. A desire to conquer, to do, to be aware, and understand what the
world was all about. So when I left that world and moved to other
places, I almost felt sorry for those lost cousins, as they seemed to
be duped by the world they found themselves in, but they didn't seem
to care.
Jumping forward thirty years, imagine that you are part of team of ten
computer programmers for a large computer-consulting firm. You are
working for a large manufacturer with its own internal staff of
computer programmers and technicians. And of course the environment
is hostile. Your team knows that as a group, they must provide a
final product that the manufacturer wants and will, therefore, enhance
the reputation and income of the consulting firm you work for.
Likewise, if you succeed, you antagonize the computer programmers and
technicians of the manufacturer you are working for. Sure, the
company managers want you to succeed, those that were responsible for
hiring you. But almost everyone else, employed by the manufacturer,
wants you to fail. You are outsiders -- aliens that do not belong
there.
The ten members of your team therefore have a lot at stake to make the
project a success. But the competition does not stop there. Each
member of the team, as well as each member of the manufacturing
company's team of programmers, are competing with each other for
status and recognition. After the project is completed, successfully
or not, the employees of each company will go back to competing
amongst themselves. It is in our nature to compete with each other
and between groups. But what drives this aggressive competition?
The Selfish Genes
Anyone familiar with the twenty years or more battle between
essentially radical environmentalists (Marxists, postmodernists,
fundamentalists, socialists, etc.) and the neo-Darwinists has
understood that the E.O. Wilson/Dawkins' perspective of evolution have
won out over the Gould/Lewontin's perspective of trying to turn back
adaptationism or what they perceive to be genetic determinism.[1]
For a full history of this battle, with its ideological quirks and
deceptions, read Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the
Sociobiology Debate and Beyond by Ullica, Segerstrale, 2000.[2]
Segerstrale does a superb job at looking at the players in this
controversy, labeling the two sides as essentially cosmopolitan versus
rural, and declaring, thru capitulation by the Marxists, that the
rural genes-eye-view has won out, along with the other concepts
interwoven into the sociobiology perspective. The Marxists could
never come up with an alternative set of hypotheses that could
withstand the challenges by empiricists. So the genes-eye-view stands
and is a fundamental concept in understanding evolution.
The Selfish Gene, written by Richard Dawkins in 1976, has been the
foundation upon which Darwinian adaptationists have built the
perspective of how organisms evolved. I will try to summarize it as
best I can for those who may not be familiar with it. About 3.8
billion years ago, life started on this planet from the primordial
soup. The evolutionary algorithm that drove organisms into higher and
higher levels of complexity are solely the results of a blind process
where genetic mutations, followed by differences in the genes between
like organism, caused the most successful genes to progress on into
the future generations. That is, all life forms or organisms are
merely organic vehicles for these genes to reside in as they replicate
and expand, filling almost every available niche of the globes
surface. There was never a grand plan, a goal, higher or lower life
forms, just a blind mathematical algorithm that changed different
organisms in response to their environments, including competition
between organisms for the successful genes to be passed onto the next
generation. For an understanding of this ratcheting process there
again is no better book than The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.
This classic book explains how this blind process, driven by only four
letters in its code, arranged in triplets, that provide the formula
for 64 possible amino acids that make up all life-forms, is essential
reading in my opinion to fully comprehend this phenomena (DNA is
nothing more than four bits in triplets or 4^3=64 for 64 possible
amino acids strung together to make any particular protein. Duplicate
amino acids however reduce the permutations down to 21 rather than
64).
That is all that any organism is. A simple genetic code strung
together in such a way that it develops into a viable living vehicle,
that if lucky will be able to help pass along into the future that
genetic code, on average, that it represents. Now this is where it
gets very interesting and where the concepts become interesting for
human behavior and its variants.
Inclusive Fitness (see appendix A for supporting quotes from The
Extended Phenotype)
Hamilton proposed that evolution or reproductive success was not
simply having more progeny, it was a matter of passing along similar
genes. That is, similar genes could act together, and in competition,
to get themselves into the next generation. Of course this is only a
metaphor, as genes can't think. But evolution acts as if they can
because of the way the combinations of genes are mixed up, rearranged,
and then compete for success at primarily the level of the vehicle,
that is you, that represents or presents your different set of genes
to the world. Your genes acted to build a vehicle to represent them.
They made you horny to get your sperm into viable women, a younger
woman preferably, because they are a better bet. They made you
sufficiently hungry to make sure you would get off your dead ass and
go out and hunt or gather food. They make you feel cold to make sure
you will seek shelter as night falls, as well as making sure that the
tribe sat around and gossiped about the day's events.
Yes, for humans, gossip became an essential driving force for the
genes-eye-view to succeed. The tribe needed to succeed as vehicles at
different levels: the individual, the family and the tribe. (See
Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by
Boehm, 1999 and reviewed on this web site.) The genes' goals are to
get passed on to the next generation, but not necessarily in any one
particular vehicle! That's correct. Just like the ant colony where
the queen produces all of the progeny and the workers' genes are a
dead end, the different combinations of genes shared by all of the
ants makes them work for the same goal. But the reductionism does not
stop there.
It is not the genes or the genome that is in competition to get passed
into the future, but the different alleles of genetic differences that
are in competition. As example and for simplicity, let's assume that
extroversion versus introversion in humans is a Mendelian genetic
variance or is just two alleles (alternate types) of just one gene. A
person is born with possibly three combinations from the two
chromosomes they inherited, one from each parent: Extroverted with
genetic alleles {AA}, neither extroverted nor introverted with alleles
{Aa}, or introverted with alleles {aa}. That is, on the two
chromosomes where this trait resides, there are two alleles in
competition with each other: {a} for introversion and {A} for
extroversion. So which allele is winning? They are both expressed
behaviors in human nature, isn't one better than the other? Nope.
In fact, most genetic variation or alleles, have gone to fixation.
That is all but about 100,000 genes have gone to fixation. There is
essentially no phenotypically expressed variation between one
individual and another. And of course we share over 97% of this
common genetic code with our closest relatives the chimpanzees. And
that is because most of our genome is involved with routine chores
such as pumping blood, filtering urine, coughing responses to clear
the throat of lodged objects, blood group types that differ but
perform equally well, etc. That is, 99% of the competition between
alleles has already been decided. The boxing match for them is over.
There are no more phenotypic differences, that is, differences that
matter that will drive the selection process. So evolution only acts
on those remaining 100,000 alleles that cause one organism or person
to develop differently from another. Athletic ability, good looks,
intelligence, aggressiveness, conscientiousness, altruism and group
cohesiveness (the subject of this article); just to name a few.
So back to the introvert; it seems pretty obvious that extroverts
should do better in the game of life than introverts. After all,
whether at work, shopping at the mall, networking with people who can
advance your career, finding a mate -- these would all seem to favor
people who are extroverted. So why haven't the introversion alleles
gone extinct? Well, several primary reasons explain this seeming
anomaly. First, the gene or genes responsible for introversion may be
linked to other genes. That is, to get rid of the introversion
allele(s) may cause adverse behavior or physical changes in other
parts of the person making it difficult to remove or get rid of alone.
That is, it is not a Mendelian gene. And of course this was the
primary mistake of the old eugenics -- thinking that something like
crime or alcoholism or introversion was a single gene that could be
eliminated.
Then there is the other problem of environments. It seems that
extroversion would be the preferred behavior, but it may not have been
in the past when we were evolving. For example, when we were a tribal
people over 10,000 years ago traveling in small bands, introversion
might have been very beneficial or even a selected for trait (again
see Hierarchy in the Forest). The small bands of people did not need
extroverts to upset the egalitarian balance. The small band needed
people who would cooperate, and introverts may be more compliant than
extroverts. Another possible explanation that we find in behaviors
that vary is that different behaviors are better under different
conditions. It is wise for an organism to keep those different
alleles when conditions may change. Introverts may have been more
successful in some environments than in others. Under a harsh feudal
lord, it may do well to silently till the fields, let the lord take
your bride's virginity as custom had it, and keep a low profile. The
extrovert who may have protested too much would not be long for this
world -- on average. And the same is true for other traits like skin
pigmentation. There is enough genetic variation in every race from
the Africans to the Norwegians with regards to skin pigmentation that
if the Norwegians suddenly found themselves in an environment with far
more sunshine, over the generations alleles for darker protective skin
would on average win out. The new Norwegians in the new location
would on average be much darker. So it is wise for alleles that may
be beneficial under different environments to stay around in small
numbers because they may increase in frequency once again some day as
needed. And if not, any one allele variant may selectively go to
fixation because it confers less benefit than its competing allelic
form of gene.
Altruism and its variance in population groups
I will use the term altruism as meaning the caring for others in the
band or tribe or beyond. Today altruists would be viewed as the
bleeding heart liberal, egalitarians, compassionate people,
do-gooders, and those people who excessively cry over the hardship of
others, no matter how remote they are genetically or physically from
the altruist. How could this possibly be? Where did evolution go
wrong? This altruism contradicts the concept of competing alleles in
the vehicles of kin who are alike. Well, that makes it in terms of
evolution a maladaptation under the current environment. It is giving
benefit to those genetic alleles that are not common in the altruist's
genome.
When humans evolved, they did so in an environment of competing bands
of people. As group evolutionary strategies evolved, altruism towards
the group was beneficial, along with genocidal hatred for other
competing groups and fanatical aggressiveness or bravery when it came
to defending the tribe, what we call today patriotism and how we
define heroes or martyrdom. The tribe, as a unified vehicle carrying
more of the alleles for these traits competed with neighboring tribes,
the more aggressive, genocidal, cohesive and intelligent tribe on
average eliminated the lesser tribe (sometimes of course taking
hostages). But slowly, humans that had bloodlust displaced the more
peaceful tribes around them, and step-by-step humans became adapted
for patriotism towards the group. Individualism was suppressed and
cohesiveness became predominant. But all was not equal between
different tribes.
The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation
Our ancestors stayed put over thousands of years and developed under
vary different environments. For example, xenophobia, group
cohesion, tribal conflict, ethnocentrism was heightened in groups that
evolved where people were in competition for resources and lived
closer together. From Asia to the Mediterranean for example, more
people could be supported by the natural resources available. There
were many more people, more tribes, and more conflicts. Evolutionary
pressures pushed competing groups towards higher frequencies of
genetic alleles that favored aggressiveness against one's neighbor.
Constant wars and conflicts accelerated this process, producing on
average people who today would score much high on ethnocentrism and
would have little time for helping or tolerating exploitation by the
other. Weak and peaceful tribes were either killed or enslaved.
At the other extreme for example, northwestern Europeans evolved in an
extremely harsh environment, one that was glaciated about 10,000 years
ago, and supported very few people. Neighboring tribes were not close
together, population density was low, and tribal conflict less salient
than planning and making provisions for the long harsh winters. In
fact, it would be easy to imagine that coming across unknown and
relatively altruistic neighbors was live saving. These people evolved
in an environment that nurtured compassion for the stranger, because
often strangers were a needed resource and not a threat. The greatest
threat came from the harsh winters, not from competing tribes. So
altruism flourished over xenophobia and fear of the other. High
frequencies of alleles for altruism, compassion, tolerance, and
benevolence towards all were selected for. But within reason of
course. As long as the other did not appear as a threat, reciprocal
altruism was selected for over intolerance.
Parasitic groups within maladaptive altruistic groups
Now we live in a world where population groups, or races at whatever
level of differentiation you would like to make, have genetic
differences with respect to ethnocentrism versus altruism. (For a
definition of race see http://home.attbi.com/~neoeugenics/jen12.htm .)
Europe, with its predominantly altruistic races, especially those
closer to the far northwestern regions, find within their midst, races
of people who are far more tribalistic, demanding, less tolerant, and
aggressive in taking as many resources as they can without concern for
the common good. These races have become, as defined by Dawkins,
parasites amongst a host population. And Dawkins' revised central
theorem states that one race (the parasite) may try to manipulate
other races (the host) in such a way as to change the host's behavior
to maximize the parasite's inclusive fitness. And of course, that is
what we are seeing today under multiculturalism in many circumstances.
And of course, one race may be a parasite in one area of society and
a host in another.
The revised central theorem proposed by Dawkins also requires that the
parasite will be free to try and manipulate the host into performing
in such a way as to benefit the parasite's fitness, while reducing the
host's fitness, and the host will not retaliate as long as the harm is
not significant. That is, if there is a great deal of benefit that
can be gotten by the parasite manipulating the behavior of the host,
the host may go along with the manipulation as long as the damage is
not too great.
This way of looking at the different races then gives us an insight
into many of the charges, counter charges, and machinations of race
relations in multicultural societies. Even in countries where the
majority is manipulated by the minority, there is little that can be
done when the forces of parasite/host manipulation takes root. A case
in point is Indonesia. They have a minority Chinese population (with a
higher average IQ) that virtually controls all of the industry and
commerce. And yet, even though there is a lot of anger and resentment
by the indigenous Indonesians, the situation for now is an
evolutionary stable strategy [ESS]. The minority Chinese have
manipulated the Indonesian elite to maintain their favored position.
India is another example. It has used the caste system not only to
keep the races apart, but also to make sure that the host races will
yield to the parasite races at the top of the caste system. In this
case again, the parasites are on average more intelligent and the host
races easily indoctrinated to accept the caste system as right and
proper.
When the United States was founded of course it did not need to
manipulate the Black race for the fitness of the White race. No
manipulation was required. Blacks were merely enslaved.
Later on however, starting in the 1960's, the host/parasite positions
began to change. Indoctrination combined with compassion or concern
for the status of Blacks by the maladaptive altruistic traits of
Whites, started putting the resources of Whites into the hands of
Blacks. Whites were being manipulated for the benefit of Blacks. How
did this occur? Blacks were not intelligent, they did not control the
press, and yet Whites were now being easily manipulated for the
increased fitness of Blacks.
At first it really did have a lot to do with concerns for justice,
what is morally right in terms of the accepted religious norms, etc.
Whites, with an overabundance of altruism just plain tried to be more
benevolent. And the media, especially television, brought the images
of an oppressed Black population into the homes of Whites who had
never lived with Blacks. They were easily indoctrinated into the
liberal viewpoint: "Blacks were equal to Whites in intelligence, and
it was only racism that kept them down." The public bought it, but
the Blacks didn't really have much to do with it. Others were pulling
the strings.
The classic host/parasite conflict is the Gentile/Jewish conflict.
(Gentile or White capitalized will refer to Whites as a race,
excluding Jews. Jews used in this paper refers to Ashkenazi Jews as a
race and not a culture or religion.) For a massive work on the
history of this conflict, its origins, its course through history,
etc. see http://home.attbi.com/~neoeugenics/mac.htm.
The Jews have been able to successfully manipulate their hosts into
behaviors that favor the fitness of Jews at the expense of their
hosts. The hosts are unable to deter this manipulation for many
reasons but the main ones are: the Jews are far more intelligent, the
Jews control the media to make indoctrination not only possible but
exceedingly easy, the Jews will fight amongst themselves but will
unite like a beehive when threatened by outsiders, they are highly
xenophobic or ethnocentric, and they have the wealth and the resources
to enforce their will nationally as well as internationally.
Likewise, Whites are not aware of being harmed by the Jews
manipulation of White's behavior that benefits Jewish fitness, and
Whites are genetically biased towards maladaptive altruism as
discussed above. This situation makes Whites extremely vulnerable
then to Jewish manipulation and harm. And as it turns out, to the
whims and wishes of many other races as well under the aegis of Jewish
media and Jewish political control. (See Appendix B for a summation of
Jewish wealth and power in the United States.)
So let us look at just some of the few manipulations of the host's
behavior that has been taking place only in the last few decades to
enhance Jewish fitness:
q Americans pay an exorbitant amount of money to prop up Israel
at the behest of American Jews. In addition, we have intervened
militarily in the Middle East as a protector of Israel. This has cost
many billions of dollars over the last few decades and there is no end
in sight.
q American foreign policy is always directed in such a way that
policy will bring no harm to Jews in other countries. To excessive
restraints on nationalism to suppression of free speech in Europe, to
supporting European policies that hurt Whites, American foreign policy
is heavily influence by Jewish interests.
q Multiculturalism has led to massive immigration in both the
United States and in Europe with a decrease in the quality of life for
Whites and an increase in crime. Whites are no longer allowed to have
a White only nation under international pressure for open borders.
q The media, courts, and especially Hollywood has been
assaulting anything that is cherished by Christians. They attack
Christian ideals, symbols, and the traditional family. (Strangely,
Christians are in my view no threat because generally they are
oblivious to these issues and are sympathetic to Judaism as a sister
religion. A failure of Christian consciousness will only revitalize
racial consciousness. )
q By promoting diversity, Whites are forced into a lesser
position of rights under quotas, affirmative action, set asides, and
opportunities. Even Asians, who already have higher educational
levels and average income, can take advantage of these minority
programs, and Whites must pay the price. (There is a mild consensus
that Jews do not like affirmative action because of resources flowing
to minorities. However, they control the media and the media is almost
universal in advocating diversity. This dilemma may be due to the
fear that if the low genetic intelligence of Blacks is ever admitted
to, Jews likewise will be tagged as genetically superior -- causing
hostility. (In private conversations with Jews, they go absolutely
apoplectic when their success is attributed to their genetic
intelligence.)[3]
q The media in general portrays Whites, as the purveyors of hate
against minorities, by only reporting the White on minority hate
crimes while ignoring the reverse. This manipulation of public
perception is primarily used to make Whites feel guilty because
therefore Whites must be incorrigible racists. This again tends to
undermine White racial identity, while the same racial identity is
encouraged in all other groups.
Conclusion
Using what we know about inclusive fitness, and evolutionary
principles in general, we are starting to understand the conflicts
between races. These conflicts are natural and predictable. How they
progress and how they will eventually be resolved, if that is
possible, is not predictable by evolutionary science, but can only be
speculated about. In the case of Whites, unless they have lost all
ethnocentrism and have become universally individualistic, more
ethnocentric races will merely slowly displace them.
This of course is highly unlikely, and the most logically expected
outcome would be racial mobilization and strife. Small cohesive White
groups will form at first, and will be dismissed as radicals by other
Whites under the current doctrine of political correctness. But
slowly, attitudes can change throughout the White race; a new ethos
will emerge, to supplant the current one. This is how races or
nations swing from one extreme to another. They must first relax
their rigid perspectives under the existing indoctrination rules
before they can accept new ones. It happens not by logical debate but
slowly, person-by-person, but driven by the changing society around
them. Already, racially conscious Whites around the world have
abandoned old hostilities between themselves in the face of external
threats. As inclusive fitness shows, humans have an innate sense of
who is the other, and will prefer to promote the genetic success of
their own kind.
====================
Notes
[1] Afterword by Daniel Dennett in The Extended Phenotype.
This book has been required reading for any serious student of
neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory since it first appeared in 1982, and
one of the striking effects of re-reading it today is that it provides
a time-lapse snapshot of the glacial pace of criticism. Stephen jay
Gould and Richard Lewontin in the United States, and Steven Rose in
the United Kingdom, have long warned the world about the 'genetic
determinism' that supposedly rises menacingly out of Dawkins's
gene's-eye view of biology, and here in Chapter 2 we find all their
most recent criticisms already handily rebutted. You would think that
in almost twenty years his opponents would have come up with some new
angle, some new crack into which they could drive a subversive wedge
or two, but, as Dawkins remarks in another context in which there has
been no evolution, 'there is apparently no available variation for
further enhancement' in their thinking. How much more satisfying, when
faced with the task of replying to your most vehement critics, to be
able simply to republish what you said on the topic many years ago!
What is this dread 'genetic determinism'? Dawkins (p. 10) cites a 1978
definition by Gould: 'If we are programmed to be what we are, then
these traits are ineluctable. We may, at best, channel them, but we
cannot change them either by will, education, or culture.' But if this
is genetic determinism -- and I have seen no seriously revised
definition from the critics -- then Dawkins is no genetic determinist
(and neither is E. 0. Wilson, or, so far as I know, any well known
sociobiologist or evolutionary psychologist). As Dawkins shows, in an
impeccable philosophical analysis, the whole idea of the 'threat' of
'genetic' (or any other kind of) determinism is so ill-thought-out by
those who brandish the term that it would be a bad joke if it weren't
a scandal. Dawkins doesn't just rebut the charges, he diagnoses the
likely sources of the confusions that make this such a tempting
charge, and as he notes, 'There is a wanton eagerness to
misunderstand.' Sad to say, he is right.
Not all criticisms of neo-Darwinian thinking are so misbegotten.
Adaptationist thinking, the critics say, is seductive; it is all too
easy to mistake an unsupported just-so story for a serious
evolutionary argument. This is true, and time and again in this book
Dawkins deftly exposes tempting lines of argument that run foul of
reality in one way or another. On p. 38, Dawkins makes the very
important point that a change in the environment may not just change
the success rate of a phenotypic effect; it may change the phenotypic
effect altogether! So much for the standard, and boringly false,
charge that the gene's-eye point of view must ignore or underestimate
the contribution of changes (including 'massively contingent' changes)
in the selectional environment, but the fact remains that
adaptationists often do ignore these (and other) complications, which
is why the book fairly bristles with warnings against facile
adaptationist reasoning.
The charge of 'reductionism', another standard epithet applied to the
gene's-eye perspective, is perversely inappropriate when leveled at
Dawkins. Far from blinding us to the marvels of higher levels of
explanation, the idea of the extended phenotype expands their powers
by removing crippling misconceptions. As Dawkins says, it permits us
to rediscover the organism. Why, if phenotypic effects do not have to
honor the boundary between organism and 'outside' world, are there
(multicellular) organisms at all? A very good question, and one that
one probably wouldn't ask -- or ask well -- if it weren't for the
perspective that Dawkins offers. Each of us walks around each day
carrying the DNA of several thousand lineages (our parasites, our
intestinal flora) in addition to our nuclear (and mitochondrial) DNA,
and all these genomes get along pretty well under most circumstances.
They are all in the same boat, after all. A herd of antelope, a
termite colony, a mating pair of birds and their clutch of eggs, a
human society -- these groupish entities are no more groupish, in the
end, than an individual human being, with its trillion-plus cells,
each a descendant of the ma-cell and pa-cell union that started the
group's voyage. 'At any level, if a vehicle is destroyed, all the
replicators inside it will be destroyed. Natural selection will
therefore, at least to some extent, favor replicators that cause their
vehicles to resist being destroyed. In principle this could apply to
groups of organisms as well as to single organisms, for if a group is
destroyed all the genes inside it are destroyed too'. So are genes all
that matter? Not at all. 'There is nothing magic about Darwinian
fitness in the genetic sense. There is no law giving it priority as
the fundamental quantity that is maximized. . . . A meme has its own
opportunities for replication, and its own phenotypic effects, and
there is no reason why success in a meme should have any connection
whatever with genetic success'.
The logic of Darwinian thinking is not just about genes. More and more
thinkers are coming to appreciate this: evolutionary economists,
evolutionary ethicists, and others in the social sciences and even in
the physical sciences and the arts. I take this to be a philosophical
discovery, and it is undeniably mind-boggling. The book you hold in
your hands is one of the best guide-books to this new world of
understanding.
[2] Book review by Matthew Nuenke of Defenders of the Truth:
This book is an amazing compilation of the battle between Marxists and
traditionalists in their debates over primarily sociobiology; but also
morals, intelligence, racism, religion and the individual philosophies
that the players brought to the debate. The author was there,
interviewing the players over thirty years, collecting their comments
and observing the fireworks.
She concludes that the debates were good for neo-Darwinists, and that
they perfected their scientific methodologies faster because of the
attacks from the left -- attacks that if looked at carefully were
contradictory and without substance. But the book concludes that it
was not a battle for truth, but rather a battle for status,
positioning, morality, etc. Even for those scholars who were
eventually made to look rather foolish in their Marxist attempts to
discredit neo-Darwinism, and especially determinism, they won big time
for their stalwartness in the face of facts. That is, they could not
be shaken in their beliefs. And this is why this book, excellent in
every way, stops short of answering the question -- What was it all
about?
Actually, the author almost stumbled upon it once in the book, when
she noted that the neo-Darwinists seemed to be "rural" in their
outlooks, and the Marxists "urban." She then noted the rural
Christians, but fails to mention the urban Jews. Was this book really
about group evolutionary strategies all along? Of course the players
did not fall neatly into ethnic or political categories. And yet in
many ways the battle lines did seem to be drawn between a Jewish and a
gentile viewpoint.
I will suggest that when reading this book, keep "group evolution" in
mind. It seems to be playing itself out in academia and the media in
these genetic wars. That is, this book looks only at the proximate
causes of the debates -- status, morality, self-deception in serving
the tribe, aggression, intolerance of other's belief systems, etc.
What is not seen, because humans have a great deal of difficulty with
seeing themselves as loyal tribesmen, is the ultimate cause of the
debate -- the cultural warfare between Jewish and Caucasian
intellectuals who are about equal in numbers in academia, even though
Jews only make up about 3% of the U.S. population. This is a battle
for power by the elites from two different tribes.
Then after reading this book, read Kevin MacDonald's recently
published trilogy on Jewish-gentile evolutionary strategies. The same
players are discussed, but with the ultimate causes included in the
warfare. And it portends that these battles are again flaring up, and
in reality they only subsided briefly after WWII and are likely to
return with a full head of steam. As yet, many scholars are
side-stepping the real issue of multiculturalism, diversity, and what
it means if humans did in fact evolve with strong tribal ethos in
place of any universal moral system. So let the games begin!
[3] As I was writing this article, I was also debating issues on
Salon's Table Talk, an online open discussion group -- so I thought.
First, I used "fuck" in a sarcastic way in one of my replies. I was
warned by the moderator. Ok, may be they scan for certain words. At
the time, I was absolutely trouncing some Jews with regards to their
intelligence as they kept maintaining it was their culture, and not
their genetics. They were really pissed because I never stooped to
their level of name-calling, I just kept pummeling them with facts.
Finally, I was permanently removed from all the forums. What had I
done? I was off topic. I was discussing issues that were supposedly
not germane to that particular thread. Of course, I was only
following them in argument -- I was not changing the subject. But all
the Jews had to do was turn me into the Jewish moderator and I was
history. This is how it is done in an open forum. Now imagine a
newspaper, a movie, etc. If you criticize Jews, you are history.
But what was really interesting is that the ten or so Jews I was
debating collectively took up a radical environmentalist argument that
is not supported by any academics that I am aware of. That is,
collectively they all began to argue that in essence, the world was
flat. It was really eye-opening to see one start, and the rest join
in to keep me from making my point. These forums are a good way to
get a feeling how Jews act instinctively as a collective.
Appendix A: supporting quotes from The Extended Phenotype
Pg. 19 'Genes for conformity, xenophobia, and aggressiveness are
simply postulated for humans because they are needed for the theory,
not because any evidence for them exists' (Lewontin 1976b). This is a
fair criticism of E. 0. Wilson, but not a very damning one. Apart from
possible political repercussions which might be unfortunate, there is
nothing wrong with cautiously speculating about a possible Darwinian
survival value of xenophobia or any other trait. And you cannot begin
to speculate, however cautiously, about the survival value of anything
unless you postulate a genetic basis for variation in that thing. Of
course xenophobia may not vary genetically, and of course xenophobia
may not be a Darwinian adaptation, but we can't even discuss the
possibility of its being a Darwinian adaptation unless we postulate a
genetic basis for it. Lewontin himself has expressed the point as well
as anybody: 'In order for a trait to evolve by natural selection it is
necessary that there be genetic variation in the population for such a
trait' (Lewontin 1979b). And 'genetic variation in the population for'
a trait X is exactly what we mean when we talk, for brevity, of 'a
gene for' X.
Pg. 21 A few workers have, indeed, flung just such a challenge at
the whole neo-Darwinian modern synthesis, and have claimed not to be
neo-Darwinians. Goodwin (1979) in a published debate with Deborah
Charlesworth and others, said, '...neo-Darwinism has an incoherence in
it ... we are not given any way of generating phenotypes from
genotypes in neo-Darwinism. Therefore the theory is in this respect
defective.' Goodwin is, of course, quite right that development is
terribly complicated, and we don't yet understand much about how
phenotypes are generated. But that they are generated, and that genes
contribute significantly to their variation are incontrovertible
facts, and those facts are all we need in order to make neo-Darwinism
coherent. Goodwin might just as well say that, before Hodgkin and
Huxley worked out how the nerve impulse fired, we were not entitled to
believe that nerve impulses controlled behavior. Of course it would be
nice to know how phenotypes are made but, while embryologists are busy
finding out, the rest of us are entitled by the known facts of
genetics to carry on being neo-Darwinians, treating embryonic
development as a black box. There is no competing theory that has even
a remote claim to be called coherent.
Pg. 26 The conclusion of the previous paragraph is inevitable,
provided only that we are evolutionists who agree to the proposition
that once upon a time our ancestors were less clever (by whatever
criterion) then we are. Yet in spite of all that, it still does not
follow that there is any genetic variation in mental abilities left in
the human population today: the genetic variance might all have been
used up by selection. On the other hand it might not, and my thought
experiment shows at least the inadvisability of dogmatic and
hysterical opposition to the very possibility of genetic variation in
human mental abilities. My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that
even if there is such genetic variation in modern human populations,
to base any policy on it would be illogical and wicked [like
set-asides, affirmative action and quotas?].
Pg. 36 Returning to the time-lag effect itself, since modern man
has drastically changed the environment of many animals and plants
over a time-scale that is negligible by ordinary evolutionary
standards, we can expect to see anachronistic adaptations rather
often. The hedgehog antipredator response of rolling up into a ball is
sadly inadequate against motor cars.
Lay critics frequently bring up some apparently maladaptive feature of
modern human behavior -- adoption, say, or contraception -- and fling
down a challenge to 'explain that if you can with your selfish genes'.
Obviously, as Lewontin, Gould and others have rightly stressed, it
would be possible, depending on one's ingenuity, to pull a
'sociobiological' explanation out of a hat, a 'just-so story', but I
agree with them and Cain that the answering of such challenges is a
trivial exercise; indeed it is likely to be positively harmful.
Adoption and contraception, like reading, mathematics, and
stress-induced illness, are products of an animal that is living in an
environment radically different from the one in which its genes were
naturally selected. The question, about the adaptive significance of
behavior in an artificial world, should never have been put; and
although a silly question may deserve a silly answer, it is wiser to
give no answer at all and to explain why.
Pg. 52 One of the main messages of this book is that, for 'many
purposes, it, is better to regard the level at which selection acts as
neither the organism, nor the group or any larger unit, but the gene
or small genetic fragment. This difficult topic will be debated in
later chapters. For the present, it is sufficient to note that
selection at the level of the gene can give rise to apparent
imperfections at the level of the individual. I shall discuss 'meiotic
drive' and related phenomena in Chapter 8, but the classic example is
the case of heterozygous advantage. A gene may be positively selected
because of its beneficial effects when heterozygous, even though it
has harmful effects when homozygous. As a consequence of this, a
predictable proportion of the individual organisms in the population
will have defects. The general point is this. The genome of an
individual organism in a sexual population is the product of a more or
less random shuffling of the genes in the population. Genes are
selected over their alleles because of their phenotypic effects,
averaged over all the individual bodies in which they are distributed,
over the whole population, and through many generations. The effects
that a given gene has will usually depend upon the other genes with
which it shares a body: heterozygous advantage is just a special case
of this. A certain proportion of bad bodies seems an almost inevitable
consequence of selection for good genes, where good refers to the
average effects of a gene on a statistical sample of bodies in which
it finds itself permuted with other genes.
Pg. 55 One of my purposes in this book is to question the 'central
theorem' that it is useful to expect individual organisms to behave in
such a way as to maximize their own inclusive fitness, or in other
words to maximize the survival of copies of the genes inside them. The
end of the previous chapter suggests one way in which the central
theorem might be violated. Organisms might consistently work in the
interests of other organisms rather than of themselves. That is, they
might be 'manipulated'.
The fact that animals frequently cause other animals to perform some
action that is against their own best interests is, of course, well
known. Obviously it happens every time an angler fish catches prey,
every time a cuckoo is fed by its foster mother. I shall make use of
both these examples in this chapter, but I shall also emphasize two
points that have not always been stressed. Firstly, it is natural to
assume that even if a manipulator gets away with it temporarily, it is
only a matter of evolutionary time before the lineage of manipulated
organisms comes up with a counter-adaptation. In other words, we tend
to assume that manipulation only works because of the 'timelag'
constraint on perfection. In this chapter I shall point out that, on
the contrary, there are conditions under which we should expect
manipulators to succeed consistently and for indefinite lengths of
evolutionary time. I shall discuss this later under the catch-phrase
of 'arms races'.
Pg. 67 We only have to accept the general plausibility of such
asymmetries in order to answer the question raised by our discussion
of manipulation. We agreed that if one organism could get away with
manipulating the nervous system of another, and exploiting its muscle
power, selection would favor such manipulation. But we were brought up
short by the reflection that selection would also favor resistance to
being manipulated. Should we, then, really expect to see effective
manipulation in nature? The life/dinner principle, and other such
principles as the rare-enemy effect, provide us with an answer. If the
individual manipulator has more to lose by failing to manipulate than
the individual victim has to lose by failing to resist manipulation,
we should expect to see successful manipulation in nature. We should
expect to see animals working in the interests of other animals'
genes.
Pg. 84 A replicator may be said to 'benefit' from anything that
increases the number of its descendant (germ-line) copies. To the
extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of
the bodies in which they sit, we may expect to see adaptations that
can be interpreted as for bodily survival. A large number of
adaptations are of this type. To the extent that active germ-line
replicators benefit from the survival of bodies other than those in
which they sit, we may expect to see 'altruism', parental care, etc.
To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the
survival of the group of individuals in which they sit, over and above
the two effects just mentioned, we may expect to see adaptations for
the preservation of the group. But all these adaptations will exist,
fundamentally, through differential replicator survival. The basic
beneficiary of any adaptation is the active germ-line replicator, the
optimon.
Pg. 90 Natural selection can cause changes in frequency only at
nucleotide loci that are heterozygous in the population. If there are
large, intervening chunks of nucleotide sequences that never differ
among individuals, these cannot be subject to natural selection, for
there is nothing to choose between them. Natural selection must focus
its attention on heterozygous nucleotides. It is changes at the single
nucleotide level that are responsible for evolutionarily significant
phenotypic changes, although of course the unvarying remainder of the
genome is necessary to produce a phenotype at all.
Pg. 112 If the organism is not a replicator, what is it? The
answer is that it is a communal vehicle for replicators. A vehicle is
an entity in which replicators (genes and memes) travel about, an
entity whose attributes are affected by the replicators inside it, an
entity which may be seen as a compound tool of replicator propagation.
But individual organisms are not the only entities that might be
regarded as vehicles in this sense. There is a hierarchy of entities
embedded in larger entities, and in theory the concept of vehicle
might be applied to any level of the hierarchy.
Pg. 146 The essential difference between the green-beard effect
and the armpit self-inspection effect is as follows. The armpit
self-inspection behavioral rule will lead to the detection of other
individuals that are similar in some respect, perhaps in many
respects, but it will not specifically lead to the detection of
individuals that possess copies of the gene mediating the behavioral
rule itself. The armpit rule might provide an admirable means of
detecting true kin from non-kin, or of detecting whether a brother was
a full brother or only a half brother. This could be very important,
and it might provide the basis for selection in favor of
self-inspecting behavior, but the selection would be conventional,
familiar kin selection. The self-inspection rule would be functioning
simply as a kin-recognition device, analogous to a rule like: 'Behave
altruistically towards individuals that grew up in your own nest.' . .
.
To return to Hamilton's comparison with assortative mating, we can see
that it does not really provide good grounds for optimism over the
plausibility of the green-beard effect. Assortative mating is much
more likely to involve self-inspection. If, for whatever reason, it is
an advantage in general for like to mate with like, selection would
favor an armpit type of behavioral rule: Inspect yourself, and choose
a mate that resembles you. This will achieve the desired result -- an
optimal balance between outbreeding and inbreeding or whatever the
advantage may be -- regardless of the exact nature of the
characteristics by which individuals differ.
Pg. 153 Mastery of the green-beard model will convince him that
altruism towards kin is not an end in itself, something that animals
are mysteriously expected to practice in accordance with some clever
mathematics that field workers don't understand. Rather, kinship
provides just one way in which genes can behave as if they recognized
and favored copies of themselves in other individuals. Hamilton
himself is emphatic on this point: '...kinship should be considered
just one way of getting positive regression of genotype in the
recipient, and ... it is this positive regression that is vitally
necessary for altruism. Thus the inclusive fitness concept is more
general than "kin selection"' (Hamilton 1975a, p. 140-141).
Pg. 162 Brought up as he is in a trusting Utopia, it might require
a major flash of revolutionary insight for our Martian to see that
much of human technology only makes sense when you realize that humans
distrust each other, that some humans work against the best interests
of other humans. There is a struggle between those who wish to obtain
illicit information from a communication system and those who wish to
withhold that information from them. Much of human technology is the
product of arms races and can only be understood in those terms.
Pg. 184 Hamilton, in a pair of papers which we can now see to have
marked a turning point in the history of evolutionary theory, made us
aware of an important deficiency in classical fitness, the measure
based on the reproductive success of an organism. The reason
reproductive success matters, as opposed to mere individual survival,
is that reproductive success is a measure of success in passing on
genes. The organisms we see around us are descended from ancestors,
and they have inherited some of the attributes that made those
individuals ancestors as opposed to non-ancestors. If an organism
exists it contains the genes of a long line of successful ancestors.
The fitness of an organism is its success as an ancestor, or,
according to taste, its capacity for success as an ancestor. But
Hamilton grasped the central importance of what, previously, had been
only glancingly referred to in stray sentences of Fisher and Haldane.
This is that natural selection will favor organs and behavior that
cause the individual's genes to be passed on, whether or not the
individual is, himself, an ancestor. An individual that assists his
brother to be an ancestor may thereby ensure the survival in the
gene-pool of the genes 'for' brotherly assistance. Hamilton saw that
parental care is really only a special case of caring for close
relatives with a high probability of containing the genes for caring.
Classical fitness, reproductive success, was too narrow. It had to be
broadened to inclusive fitness, which will here be called fitness.
Pg. 86 Hamilton clearly saw this fallacy, and therefore his
concept of inclusive fitness was more subtle. The inclusive fitness of
an organism is not a property of himself, but a property of his
actions or effects. Inclusive fitness is calculated from an
individual's own reproductive success plus his effects on the
reproductive success of his relatives, each one weighed by the
appropriate coefficient of relatedness. Therefore, for instance, if my
brother emigrates to Australia, so I can have no effect, one way or
the other, on his reproductive success, my inclusive fitness does not
go up each time he has a child!
Pg. 195 Our statement is that there is a statistical tendency for
individuals with G1 to be more likely than individuals with G2 to show
P1 (rather than P2). Of course there is no need to demand that P1
should always be associated with G1, nor that G1 should always lead to
P1: in the real world outside logic textbooks, the simple concepts of
'necessary' and 'sufficient' must usually be replaced by statistical
equivalents.
Such an insistence that phenotypes are not caused by genes, but only
phenotypic differences caused by gene differences may seem to weaken
the concept of genetic determination to the point where it ceases to
be interesting. This is far from the case, at least if the subject of
our interest is natural selection, because natural selection too is
concerned with differences. Natural selection is the process by which
some alleles out-propagate their alternatives, and the instruments by
which they achieve this are their phenotypic effects. It follows that
phenotypic effects can always be thought of as relative to alternative
phenotypic effects.
It is customary to speak as if differences always mean differences
between individual bodies or other discrete 'vehicles'. The purpose of
the next three chapters is to show that we can emancipate the concept
of the phenotypic difference from that of the discrete vehicle
altogether, and this is the meaning of the title 'extended phenotype'.
I shall show that the ordinary logic of genetic terminology leads
inevitably to the conclusion that genes can be said to have extended
phenotypic effects, effects which need not be expressed at the level
of any particular vehicle.
Pg. 233 It will be remembered that the 'central theorem' of the
selfish organism claims that an animal's behavior tends to maximize
its own (inclusive) fitness. We saw that to talk of an individual
behaving so as to maximize its inclusive fitness is equivalent to
talking of the gene or genes 'for' that behavior pattern maximizing
their survival. We have now also seen that, in precisely the same
sense as it is ever possible to talk of a gene 'for' a behavior
pattern, it is possible to talk of a gene, in one organism, 'for' a
behavior pattern (or other phenotypic characteristic) in another
organism. Putting these three things together we arrive at our own
'central theorem' of the extended phenotype: An animal's behavior
tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behavior,
whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular
animal performing it.
Pg. 248 But I have not the wings to fly in mathematical spaces.
There must be a verbal message for those that study animals in the
field. What difference will the doctrine of the extended phenotype
make to how we actually see animals? Most serious field biologists now
subscribe to the theorem, largely due to Hamilton, that animals are
expected to behave as if maximizing the survival chances of all the
genes inside them. I have amended this to a new central theorem of the
extended phenotype: An animal's behavior tends to maximize the
survival of the genes 'for' that behavior, whether or not those genes
happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing the
behavior. The two theorems would amount to the same thing if animal
phenotypes were always under the unadulterated control of their own
genotypes, and uninfluenced by the genes of other organisms. In
advance of a mathematical theory to handle the quantitative
interactions between conflicting pressures, perhaps the simplest
qualitative conclusion is that the behavior we are looking at may be,
at least partly, an adaptation for the preservation of some other
animal's or plant's genes. It may therefore be positively maladaptive
for the organism performing the behavior.
Once when I tried to persuade a colleague of this -- he is a staunch
believer in the power of Darwinian selection, and a good field
investigator of it -- he thought that I was making an anti-adaptation
point. He warned me that time and again people had written off some
quirk of animal behavior or morphology as functionless or maladaptive,
only to discover that they had not fully understood it. He was right.
But the point I am making is different. When I say here that a
behavior pattern is maladaptive, I only mean it is maladaptive for the
individual animal performing it. I am suggesting that the individual
performing the behavior is not the entity for whose benefit the
behavior is an adaptation. Adaptations benefit the genetic replicators
responsible for them, and only incidentally the individual organisms
involved.
Appendix B: The power and wealth of the Jews from the book The Jewish
Phenomenon by by Steven Silbiger, 2000
That closer look revealed a picture of a very small group with a great
deal of economic and social success. Of course, that was no surprise
to me. My parents raised me as a Jew with expectations of economic
achievement, education and success. In addition, I had no shortage of
role models from my family, my community, the media and the world.
Economic success was the norm in my Jewish community.
Did I buy into a stereotype perpetuated out of ethnic pride, or was
there a truth to it? Being critical by nature, I quickly uncovered
some compelling facts that prove Jewish success is indeed a fact in
America:
1.) The percentage of Jewish households with income greater than
$50,000 is double that of non-Jews.
2.) On the other hand, the percentage of Jewish households with income
less than $20,000 is half that of non-Jews.
3.) "The Jewish advantage in economic status persists to the present
day; it remains higher than that of white Protestants and Catholics,
even among households of similar age, composition and location."
4.) Forty-five percent of the top 40 of the Forbes 400 richest
Americans are Jewish.
5.) "One-third of American multimillionaires are tallied as Jewish."
6.) Twenty percent of professors at leading universities are Jewish.
7.) Forty percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and
Washington are Jewish!
8.) Thirty percent of American Nobel prize winners in science and 25
percent of all American Nobel winners are Jewish.
It didn't end there. In his book Ethnic America, Dr. Thomas Sowell, an
African-American economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute,
created a point-scale index that graphed Jewish economic success
compared with that of other ethnic groups:
ETHNIC HOUSEHOLD INCOME
(U.S. Average = 100)
JEWISH 172
JAPANESE 132
POLISH 115
CHINESE 112
ITALIAN 112
GERMAN 107
ANGLO-SAXON 107
IRISH 103
U.S. AVG. 100
FILIPINO 99
WEST INDIAN 94
MEXICAN 76
PUERTO RICAN 63
BLACK 62